Tuesday, June 30, 2009

An update, a video and thoughts on the interview

Our appearance on the Jesse Woodrow show went well; I wholeheartedly advise watching our YouTube video (below) which is a distillation of the exchange that occurred. It's also a recording of the interview from our end, so it's crystal clear - quite a bit better than had you watched live - yet we still captured the host and the chat room to reproduce the experience of the live feed.

Be warned: this video may or may not also contain piquant "LOL-commentary" for your amusement; I'll constrain that probabilitysomewhere between 1 and 1 that it does.

Before I let you go, I must mention that I still am boundlessly surprised at the misinformation that creationists seem so passionately to profess; Jesse Woodrow's feeble grasp on the theory of evolution was in such wild contrast to the conviction with which he spoke about it- confronting this requires one to consciously recall that the certainty with which an opinion is spoken does not correlate to its validity.

Along that line, sometimes I muse in wonder at the prevalence of creation science and how people manage to swallow such incoherent drivel, however, today my wonder was dispelled; when a fundamentalist opens his mouth, a world of madness spews forth- and yet it is a world entirely devoid of doubt.

Fundamentalists: deluded, irrational, misinformed, whatever you want to call them, must at least be lauded in some upside-down manner for not flinching in the face of reason. No, they carry on, each step more strident than the last, deep into the dark pits of insanity, smearing pitch over their eyes to guide them on their way.

Well, I listened to it before you posted this. I even listened to some of his follow-up piece in which they just make you out to be uninformed and pathetic. But then I got ill and turned it off about half way through.

Ah, that's to be expected; the fundamentalist must either start the machine of misinformation roaring in the face of reason or concede to its authority - and a radio show host who's desperate to save face can never do the latter.

Though I have to say it would take some pretty remarkable spin on his part to make it really seem as though I were the uninformed party; his claims of the phantom bird-dog Darwin quote and the assertion that atheists suddenly "appeared" for the first time in the 1800s stand out in my memory as particularly untenable and ignorant statements.

His indefensible position is most revealed, though, by the fact that he had no retorts during the interview (though he certainly had ample opportunity as every time he opened his mouth we were in for 5 minutes of meandering); he can make 100 podcast followups afterward claiming I'm all wrong - but that's no longer a discussion. It's just an attempt to contravene my statements without the danger of my being there to prove him wrong.

Of course the kind of creationist who's going to take his word at face value is hopeless; but discovering that their host is at odds with documented history and the scientific community at large will spur at least some of his viewers to begin to look at his claims more critically. And every desperate follow-up on his part will only drive their skepticism deeper.